Gordon Adams

Gordon Adams is a Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service, American University, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. He was the senior White House national security budget official from 1993-97, as Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. He is the co-author of Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for its Global Role and Safety at Home (Routledge, 2010), and author of The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting (Transaction, 1981). He writes and blogs regularly on foreign and national security policy and budgets.

Articles from Contributor

Over the last few months, the aerospace industry has become a thespian, staging a drama of fear about the impact of a sequester on defense. Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens warned his employees that as many at 10,000 Lockheed jobs …

Marine General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is planning for the end – the withdrawal of U.S. forces, expecting to leave behind a small training force, but saddling the U.S. taxpayers with at least $2 billion a year to pay for the Afghan security force. Better deal than we have now, at roughly $100 billion a year, …

The Army, it would appear, and, perhaps the nation, has learned nothing from its unhappy experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. This morning’s New York Timesreports that Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno is setting off to restructure large pieces of his ground force to do in other regions, especially Africa, what they have done …

The next seven months is going to be fun for bloggers, journalists, and other remnants of the chattering class, but it won’t shed much truth. Wait until November for that. The latest rounds have been fired this week. The …

Last week, as he issued his political budget, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan tried to pull the “Generals are not telling us the honest truth” rabbit out of the hat. The Wisconsin Republican was suggesting that either the military leadership was lying — in saying they could live with $487 billion less over the next 10 …

Leon Panetta rolled out some of the first details on the new FY 2013 defense budget on Thursday. It’s the first since FY 1998 to actually decline in nominal terms (though FY 2011 and FY 2012 were “real” cuts, as they did not …

The President’s plan for deficit reduction, sent today to the Super Committee, collects 25% of its overall spending reductions by bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Bringing them home is probably a good thing, but the budget savings the administration claims will only appear when porcine animals are airborne. The …

The Senate Defense appropriators have made a good first step towards returning discipline to the defense budget in their mark for FY 2012. According to Sen. Inouye, DOD will have the same resources for FY 2012 they had for FY 2011, zero budget growth, or a flat line. This confirms what DOD still needs to acknowledge fully – we are in a …

We just can’t help ourselves. No sooner did it look like Khadafi was on his way out then the promoters of “post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization” and “stability operations” were on the march. Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, told the world that “NATO has to pick up the pieces.” He called for an …

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mullen can hardly be expected to step up to the mike and say they can live with $800-900 billion fewer dollars than the Department currently projects it would like to have for defense.

The didn’t disappoint yesterday. They can live with the roughly $400 billion …

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld emerged from the woodwork last week to warn Leon Panetta not to do the wrong thing. He should know; his stewardship of DOD was an almost unmitigated laundry list (should we say “snowflakes”?) of wrong things.

But I wouldn’t recommend Panetta take his advice. Rumsfeld has no idea of how to …